For
at least the last 40 years most of
us have been taking vitamin and mineral
supplements and have been doing and
feeling somewhat better. Almost
daily now there is more and more information
on the function of some nutrient and
on its place in the overall scheme
of health.

But I've
got a question! If these nutrients fill
their allotted functions then why don't
they seem to work the same for everyone?
In other words, they seem to help some
folks and not to work at all in others!
Is there some underlying thing that allows
these nutrient substances to perform
their actions? Are vitamins, minerals
and herbs the do all end all of attaining
wellness or, are they the bricks and
cement that must be placed on a solid
foundation before they can take up their
tasks solidly?

Let's
redefine some terms. In 1913, Dr.
Funk discovered nutritional substances
he called "Vital Amines" or
Vitamins for short. Without getting
into biochemistry it turns out that vitamins
are not amines but coenzymes, substances
that help enzymes to work. An enzyme
is a huge protein that speeds up chemical
reactions. Without enzymes, chemical
reactions would happen so slowly that
life would not be able to exist at all. The
human body has some 3000+ enzymes and
over 7000 enzymic reactions.

Most
folks think of enzymes as being involved
only in digestion. This is among the
last things that enzymes do. Of all the
enzymes in the body, the protein cleaving
(or cutting-eating) ones are the most
important. These have 4 primary
actions, they:

Folks
who do not experience the beneficial
reactions expected from their coenzymes
(vitamins) possibly don't have the enzymes
that the coenzyme is supposed to help!
The human body produces a finite amount
of enzymes. From the age of 27
on, that enzyme production begins to
wane. Dr. Max Wolf, an MD with
7 other Ph.D.'s after his name, researched
enzymes and hormones at Columbia University
from the 1930's through the 1960's. He
found that round about 27 most folks
stop making as many enzymes as they used
to and that this event started the cycle
of aging. In physiology we are
taught that old age begins at 27!

The
progression of aging goes like this:

Round about age 27: Enzyme production
drops - 27-35 marks the time when most
of our aches, pains and arthritic changes
begin to set in. Fibrosis begins
building in the organs, blood vessels
and muscles. Immune function begins
to lag which is further complicated by
high stress lifestyles. Blood begins
to become thicker and harder to circulate.

From
35 to 45 the drop in enzymes and stress
of lifestyle causes a reduction in the
all-important sexual hormones of testosterone
and progesterone. Sex drive, mental
drive, zest for life, bone density, muscle
mass and overall energy go down significantly.

At 45, we begin to have trouble absorbing
the nutrients we need to maintain the
4 types of tissue we have in our bodies
and these tissues begin to break down
and malfunction. Here also from lack
of proper eating and exercise complicated
by smoking or air pollution, our blood
is as thick as catsup. We don't
have great circulation and oxygen is
not getting every where we need to get
it to! Especially up to our brains.

From
50 through 60, we lose an estimated 10%
muscle mass a year so that by the time
we are 60 we are at bare bones minimal
muscle mass to move us around - getting
out of bed, off the potty or out of a
deep chair becomes a chore. If
the thighs and pelvic muscles, which
are the strongest ones in the body are
weak and have trouble getting you up
then how are the other muscles doing?

From
60 onward, our internal organs begin
to shrink and further malefaction. That
goes as well for the brain. The
brain is 60 to 70% cholesterol. Everything
we think with is based on a fat linked
to a protein. If we are lacking
for the good fats needed to produce neurotransmitters
and maintain itself, then the brain begins
to shrink and malfunction. If you've
ever seen the MRI picture of an Alzheimer
patient's brain, it looks like a dried,
shrunken, cracked jello mold someone
left out on the kitchen table under a
ceiling fan for a week! The last 30 years
of the low cholesterol craze has done
nothing to lower the rate of heart disease
and everything to increase the rate of
the formerly rare Alzheimer's! Look in
any Alzheimer's ward, are there any fat
people there?

How do
we stave off these ravages? If we are
in the midst of them, how do we slow
their progress down? And how do we make
the vitamins and minerals we are taking
work better. We need to go back to the
beginning of the degeneration and replace
what we're missing.

Let's
touch on again why vitamins, minerals
and herbs alone don't work. Let's
look at the lives or deaths rather, of
some of the greatest nutritional teachers
and practitioners of our time: Dr. Paul
Kellogg - heart attack. Dr. Bernard
Jenkins - prostate cancer. Dr.
Carlton Frederick's - lung cancer. Dr.
Pavo Aerola - stroke. Dr. Paul
Bragg drowned after being knocked unconscious
in the water by his surfboard at the
age of 93! What differentiated Dr. Bragg
from the rest?

Look
at the bodies of some of the better known
nutritional teachers and "natural" doctors
now...go ahead think of them. Their faces
and pictures are on books and television
constantly. Are they severely overweight? Or,
are they so thin and worn that they look
as if they've just stepped out of a Siberian
prison camp? If taking all of these good
vitamins, minerals and herbs do it all
then why did Kellogg, Jenkins**
(See Note), Fredericks and Aerola get
sick and die. Why are the current
gurus of "integrative medicine" overweight
or emaciated, why don't they look like
Dr. Bragg did, a handsome, muscular,
vibrant man glowing with energy and power
even in his 90's.

Here
we go back to Dr. Wolfs' work and we
start with, you guessed it, enzymes. If
we maintained a high enzyme intake from
our young years then we held off the
changes that low enzyme levels precipitated. This
is what Dr. Bragg did, through his mainly
raw fruit and vegetable diet he replaced
or substituted for many of the enzymes
his body lagged in making.
This kept his hormone levels high throughout
his life.

Testosterone
maintained the size and mass of his bone
structure, his muscle mass and most importantly
his brain. In men it has been found that
the brain structure known as the medial
amygdala is larger that it is in women.
This is where a mans drive and zest for
life come from.

As men
age and testosterone levels go down (round
about 35 to 45) estrogen levels go up.
This causes the medial amygdala to shrink
and with the shrinking goes a mans mental
energy. A man in his 50's has more estrogen
than his wife! High estrogen levels bring
depression, anger, weight gain, lack
of libido, mood swings and decreased
erection size. We now know that it is
estrogen that converts to the dreaded
hormone Di Hydro testosterone (DHT) that
wrecks our prostate and causes us to
lose our hair! (Studies have confirmed
this - swollen prostates and severe hair
loss don't happen to testosterone dominant
men in their teens and 20's).

With
gals, the drop in progesterone levels
to near 0 before and after menopause
causes much the same effects, i.e. lack
of mental drive, depression, moodiness,
loss of bone and muscle mass, weight
gain, etc. For decades MD's have concentrated
on the estrogen after menopause. While
it is true that estrogen levels in these
women are lower than they previously
were, their progesterone and testosterone
levels are practically nonexistent making
them still estrogen dominant. Estrogen
is the fuel that sparks fibrocystic breast
disease, breast cancer, uterine fibroids
and cervical cancer.

OK, so
we did not do what Dr. Bragg did and
eat enzymes from a young age. So,
once they are gone, we'll need to replace
them. What Next?

Oxygen.
We have been 'plagued' by all the nutritional
data about antioxidants for at least
15 years leading most folks to think
that oxygenation is a bad thing. The
strongest antioxidant you can find is
to wrap your lips around a tailpipe! Life
is an oxidative process! All disease
states arise from, are fed by or are
complicated by a lack of oxygen.

Oxygen
not only feeds tissue and is vital to
life, oxygen will also; kill viruses,
burn bacteria, singe yeast, and dissolve
cancer. Disease states are anaerobic. All
bugs hate oxygen. Cancer cells
for example, feed off of glycogen (anaerobic
respiration), and die in the strong presence
of oxygen! Part of a healthy immune
system is to have the circulation, rich
red blood cells and clean thin blood
needed to carry oxygen throughout the
body to every nook and cranny thereby
killing off anything that may be thinking
of festering there due to the lack of
sufficient oxygen.

So we
add Oxygen to our mix.

Finally
we need to have an efficient outside
to efficiently and painlessly carry our
efficient insides around! For this,
aerobic training will not do. All
of the jazz exercise, yoga, karate aerobics,
and even swimming and walking simply
will not do. For this we have to
strength train! Mind you I said
strength training not body building. There
is a huge difference I'll get to explain
in a bit.

First
let's look at something known as Wolfes'
(a different Wolf this time) physiological
law. A physiological law is an
uncontested truth. That's the way
it works - no questions about it! Wolfes'
law states: "Mineralization is laid
into bone along axial lines of stress". What
that means is that unless we compress
hard, tug hard and yank hard on a bone,
it will not fill well with minerals or
maintain it's mineral mass. Most
MD's think Wolfes' law can be fulfilled
by simple weight bearing as in walking,,,they
are dead wrong. For one thing,
while walking, what weight bearing do
the arms, shoulders and mid back do?

How can
they benefit from the walking? For another,
the first principle of exercise is that
a muscle prefers to get its exercise
in its primary range of motion in as
great a range of motion as it can safely
do. This will stress the bones
sufficiently to produce the adaptive
response of mineralizing. Walking
has a mere 13 degrees of range of motion
at the hip and knee when the hip is capable
of 160 degrees of range and the knee
135 degrees. So how much exercise
is 13 degrees? Not much. For
walking to be a good exercise in bone
building for the pelvis and lower extremity,
you would have to going very fast up
hill both ways....coming and going. Not
likely to happen.

Now --
what's this difference between strength
training and body building? A heck
of a lot. Body building bloats
muscles through a process known as hypertrophy
and does not produce a lot of strength
for the size. Real strength training
on the other hand produces dense strong
muscle through a process called hyperplasia. Do
any of the lightweight Olympic weight
lifting champions look like bodybuilders
do? No. Do the men in the "Worlds
Strongest Man" competitions look
like bodybuilders? No. Look at the bantam
and lightweight class of Olympic lifters.
Yet these small men and women are some
3 to 4 times stronger and more able than
the biggest of bodybuilders. We
are not going for kissable beautiful
biceps. We are shooting for useable
strength for the Activities of Daily
Living (ADL's) and: to keep our
circulation up, our bones strong, and
very importantly increase the number
of mitochondria in the muscle cells.

The energy
we use for everything in our lives is
produced by mitochondria. It is
these furnaces of the cells where Adenosine
Tri Phosphate is produced (ATP). ATP
is the sugar everything in our bodies
is powered by. Most all of the
ATP in the body is made in the muscles. The
brain uses 33% of the bodies' daily energy,
the eyes 33% and the remainder of our
body the rest! If we have lowered
numbers of mitochondria, as in Mononucleosis,
Fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue or due
to age and loss of muscle, then all of
our energy is significantly reduced and
we are in a fog.

The only
thing that can significantly increase
the number of mitochondria in our bodies
is STRENGTH TRAINING. Period. And
yes, I know that for the last 20 years
the medical emphasis has been on the
aerobic training of the heart. Again
research now shows that couch potatoes
are living as long as their marathon
running cousins and, that runners are
dying of heart disease anyway while they
sink their immune systems and wreck their
joints with all the aerobic work! As
we age, frame strength becomes more important
than heart endurance. When was
the last time you ran after the postman
because he forgot to pick up a letter? But
you arise from bed, the toilet and chairs
every day. Strength is important
not only in maintaining the circulation
to our extremities but to perform all
of the activities of daily living from
blow drying our hair, to serving the
table, to picking the skillet up from
that bottom shelf! Nuff said.

Let's
put this all together: When we
only take vitamins, minerals and herbs,
as important as they are, we are skirting
around the outside of the essentials
for health. If we just take supplements
and not replace the enzymes we are wasting
a good bit of money, expectation and
time.

If we
don't raise our levels of the sexual
hormones, i.e. progesterone and testosterone,
then we cannot stop or reverse the bone
and muscle loss; we'll be depressed,
gain fat and have no drive for life.

If we
don't have high levels of circulating
oxygen, we'll have bugs grow and fester
throughout our bodies and have low energy
and shortened life span.

If we
don't maintain our frame, we can forget
the rest of the program as it will give
out and disease regardless of whatever
else we do.

So
again the cornerstones of life and
wellness are:

Enzymes from juicing, raw
foods and most importantly from supplementation. We
need the supplements as the most essential
enzymes for avoiding or combating the catastrophic
diseases are the enzymes we may no longer make
as much of. Pancreatin is essential in
the prevention and fight against all cancers
and inflammations. Eating raw pancreas
and meat is out of the question. So,
we have to find the finest enzyme supplement
and take it liberally.

Progesterone
and testosterone. With
simple saliva tests we can determine
just how low or off we are in our hormone
balance and then safely supplement
the loss with topical creams that are
natural and without side effects. Testosterone
has gotten a bad rap in the last 20
years as a cancer producer and aggression
maker. The latest research shows
the truth. Natural testosterone;
protects the heart from disease, is
the greatest antidepressant known,
maintains sex drive, bone mass and
muscle mass, lowers cholesterol and
levels of body fat, protects the prostate
and maintains mental drive! Karuna
makes the purest most utilizable progesterone
supplement cream on the market today
and is available at www.docsprefer.com.

Oxygen.
We first clean the blood with the enzymes.
Then we make the blood rich with oxygen
carrying red blood cells. We then increase
the circulation by opening up clogged
blood vessels with enzymes and
then make miles and miles of new blood
vessels through weight training. On
top of that, to make sure we are always
oxygen rich to fight off bugs despite
air pollution and the rest we'll
supplement with a rich oxygen source. After
much disappointment in the O2 supplement
I used to recommend we went searching
round for another. My wife Michele came
upon a medical doctor who is in the business
of manufacturing his own stabilized oxygen
product. He told us of manufacturing
processes old and new, and how the new
processes could boost the strength of
the product. Most of the stabilized oxygen
products on the market are 50,000 ppm
or 5% oxygen and may be akin to bleach,
this alternative doc has been building
his to be bleach free, professional strength
stabilized oxygen at 5 times the strength
(250,000 ppm or 25%). He sells this strength
of product only to health professionals.
Guaranteed to kick ass on bacteria, fungus,
viruses and guaranteed to increase tissue
oxygen with all of the good benefits
that brings.

Exercise.
Finally we'll shore up our frames and
boost our energy producing structures
with strength training. This will
lessen the incidence of injury, maintain
our bone and muscle mass, increase our
circulation, lubricate the joints, feed
our brain better and give us the ability
to carry ourselves around for life without
being a burden to ourselves and others.

Does all that sound reasonable? Well
stay tuned. We're in this for Life!

**Note
Correction as Sent to Me:
From: Judy & Dan Hogge
Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2003
4:01 PM
I want to state for the record.
Dr. Bernard Jensen did not die of Prostate
Cancer. He did get it and it was really
bad. His PSA was over 1600 and it was
matastic thru out his bones.
After he was told good bye from all
his family and co-workers. He wasn't
expected to live thru the weekend.
Michael O'Brein was called in to see
if he could be saved. He put him on
a very rigourus Enzyme protocol. In
8 weeks 1 day his cancer was gone.
He was still very sick and weak. But
there was no sign of cancer. He broke
his back in a car accident just after
being released from the hospital. The
Mayo Clininc told him he would never
walk again.
Michael O'Brein was called again. 2
1/2 months he was out of his wheelchair.
He lived for 10 more years. Bernard
Jensen died at 96 yrs old that was
2 1/2 years ago in March. He decided
he was ready to go home and stopped
eating. He did not die of Cancer.
Michael O'Brein is my teacher and mentor
with the Enzymes. He also saved my
life 2 1/2 years ago.

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